“The Idiots — S’pore”: From PAP loudhailer to running dog?

So “The Idiots — S’pore” (or TISG as it used to call itself but now calls itself “The Independent”) is cleaning up its act: “We have reached a new checkpoint and we’re looking at how we can expand our editorials to cover a wider segment of society … asked founding editor Mr P N Balji and a veteran journalist, Mr Suresh Nair, to step in and to review the contents in the website.”

Rumour is The Idiots got told to clean up its act or else …. Well the words “a new checkpoint” and “review the contents in the website”, and stopping publication until the review is completed sure gives credibility to this rumour.

Looks like its loudhailing services* for the PAP administration were not appreciated and so two minders were appointed. I’ve written on Balji before (example). As to Suresh Nair this paragraph in http://www.writers.net/writers/83365 is interesting

Among his current editorial clients are NTUC Media, Petir (PAP magazine), North-East CDC and South-West CDC.

Whatever, I’m glad that time has been called on a publication that reasonable people can perceive as trying “to promote feelings of ill-will and hostility between different races or classes of the population of Singapore”. Harry would approve.

A reader of this alerted me to the exchange to show the depths to which TISG will sink to. To me it shows the arrogance of TISG: telling Daniel Goh that he should comment on TISG’s wall because TISG has “1m unique visitors”. P Ravi and Kumaran Pillay (TISG’s publisher) like to say that TISG has the eyeballs that others are jealous about, hence the criticism about its journalistic and editorial standards.

On the issue of eyeballs and ad revenue from eyeballs,, I’ve calculated that the amount of revenue generated by TISG from eyeball advertising is “peanuts”.

Soul selling for peanuts

Based on a reported boast that it has 3.5m views a month, it would make about $9,000 in ad revenue a month. Based on some more reliable data that it has about 670,000 views a month, the figure comes to around $1700 (Detailed post coming one of these days and these numbers may be refined slightly).

Note I’m only guesstimating only revenue generated from eyeball ads. I make no comment on revenues from other sources because no data is available.

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*TISG’s then lead editor, P Ravi, while rowing with various people recently (mainly from TOC allied people) on journalistic and editorial standards of integrity said (boastingly?) on Facebook: “Government and related agencies see us as a useful loudhailer.”For the context in which he said this, scroll down to almost the bottom until you see his photo, the text is somewhere below: http://www.theonlinecitizen.com/2016/08/09/tisg-lashes-out-in-response-to-ncmp-daniel-gohs-remarks-on-its-article/.